Frustration

Extract

Has there ever been such a general sense of frustration as the world is suffering from today? I think not. In Pagan times this state of mind was certainly unknowm. People had bad luck, no doubt quite often, and keenly regretted it: but they never felt frustrated, for there was no basic, fundamental expectation which had got the bottom knocked out of it. Pagans knew that the gods were jealous and that a run of good luck and success was sure to break sooner or later. Or else, as the Hindu would put it, if he had a rough time, it was just his bad Karma; he was now merely paying in this life for the ill deeds he had committed in a previous’ one. Bad luck or bad Karma in neither case admitted of a sense of frustration.

In Christian times obviously there was no room for frustration either. What was this life but a vale of tears, a pilgrimage to one’s true home in another world? And if one did not expect anything better, how could one feel frustrated? Even when Christendom came to pieces and life became more and more secularized and paganized, the concept of frustration was absent. The eighteenth century witnessed the discovery of steam power and the ushering-in of the machine age: soon God was declared to be a hypothesis, which was no longer required, and man, instead of waiting for a better world beyond the grave, now began with his newly discovered powers to construct a better world right here.